A Year in Reading: Scott Esposito

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Prose by Thomas Bernhard: If you come to my house and look at my bookshelves, you can very quickly and easily distinguish the gods from the demigods and lesser beings. The gods simply take up more space, and they do so in the shape of rows of books with their names on them. Thomas Bernhard is a god, and right now he has a 7-book tract of shelf that will surely grow very, very soon.

Prose is his first story collection, originally published in 1967 and, amazingly, not once translated into English until 2010. It was worth the wait. This is Bernhard being Bernhard (as he always was)–the endless paragraphs; the mordant, suicidal, probably insane narrators; the incredible mastery of language. With Bernhard, the novels are the big game, but in a way these stories are nicer than the novels because they’re so much more compact, yet still maintain a lot of the flourishes and impact, just without the level of repetition that you tend to get in some of the looser novels.

It’s a shame that Bernhard has taken so long to be discovered in English (he did most of his writing in the 1960s through the 1980s and died in 1989); but there is at least one nice thing about it–there are still “new” Bernhard books out there to be discovered (and even the previously translated ones are often out of print and await a publisher to make them new to us again). Prose is one of those “discoveries” and it was certainly one of the best things I read this year.

Scott Esposito
is the author of The End of Oulipo? (with Lauren Elkin), forthcoming from Zero Books in January 2013. His criticism has appeared in The Paris Review Daily, Tin
House, The Washington Post, Bookforum, the Los Angeles Times, The Barnes & Noble Review, and Publishers Weekly, among many others. He blogs at Conversational Reading and edits The Quarterly Conversation, an online magazine of book reviews and essays.

I kept a reading journal for the first time this year and I highly recommend it. It’s humbling for one (that’s all I read?), inspiring (read more!), and clarifying (choose well). That said, it was a pretty great year reading-wise. I read David Mitchell’sBlack Swan Green twice, re-read Turgenev’sFirst Love, William Gass’On Being Blue, and Don DeLillo’sEnd Zone, and I highly recommend them all. With everything going on with the Penn State scandal, Margaux Fragoso’s harrowing memoir of sexual abuse, Tiger, Tiger is both timely and even more devastating. I finally read Jeffrey Eugenides’The Virgin Suicides and thought it was terrific. I took Ann Patchett’s advice at the opening of Parnassus, her independent bookstore in Nashville, and bought Denis Johnson’sTrain Dreams, devouring it in a single sitting. I had so much fun reading The Stories of John Cheever in conjunction with The Journals of John Cheever that I read Saul Bellow’sThe Adventures of Augie March in tandem with his Letters, which includes a wonderful introduction by its editor, Benjamin Taylor. J.M. Coetzee’sDisgrace — my first experience with his work — was riveting, appalling, and beautiful. Jim Shepard’s story collection Like You’d Understand, Anyway was so wide-reaching, variegated, and emotionally precise I felt like I’d read a collection of micro-novels.

Still, of all the books I read, only Cormac McCarthy’sBlood Meridian took over my world, and by that I mean I had that rare experience, while immersed in it, of seeing reality through its lens whenever I put it down and in the days after I finished it. Ostensibly it’s about a band of Indian hunters run amok along the Texas-Mexico border in the mid-nineteenth century but really it’s about how man’s natural state is warfare. You can buy that bill of goods or not but like McCarthy’s greatest works (Suttree, The Crossing) it’s written in his inimitable style, that fusion of The Book of Isaiah, Herman Melville, and Faulkner (though he’s more precise than the latter, more desolate and corporeal than Moby Dick’s author; whether his prophetic powers are on par with his artistry remains to be seen), a voice which is all his own, of course, and has an amplitude I’ve encountered only in, what, DeLillo at his most ecstatic? Murakami at his most unreal? Bellow in Augie March or Herzog? Alice Munro in The Progress of Love? John Hawkes in The Lime Twig? Read it if you read anything this coming year and note: a bonus to the experience is that you’ll add at least two hundred words to your lexicon.